Standing on top of a building, Yami leans into the wind as he contemplates how much of a slave he is to the Puzzle, and to Yugi. Getting goaded on by arguably the most unsympathetic person he knows does not help.

I used to yearn for freedom. It was my deepest desire and my fondest
dream, but I could never have it. Not
really. I'm committed to a boy–no. A young man, a teen rapidly growing out of
his former innocence and opening his eyes to the realities of this world. A juvenile whom I cherish with all of my
being and to whom I am chained for eternity.
And to add insult to injury, I am chained to what is essentially a part
of myself through an object that was once my prison for years. Yes, I used to live in what is now a
necklace. If you could call it living.

So I
could never be free, not really. Oh
sure, I can manifest by myself now; I can act as I please and I can go where I
want, but I must always return. Like a
dog to its master. I think that makes
me a servant, or a slave. Yes, I must
return to him because I am, by all means and reasoning, owned by a master. A big step down from Pharaoh, so I think I
have the right to be bitter.

I'm not
sure why I wanted out of the arrangement that had been cosmically decided for
me at some point in my foggy past. It
must be some basic instinctual need that even I possess. But it still doesn't make any sense. I was happy, I had a purpose and a sense of
fulfilment, and I had as many rights as could be granted considering my
'circumstances'. Being a dead spirit
instantly eliminates my right to vote for example, not that I bother with
anything outside of my life and assigned purpose. But even with all I had, I was still not free.

It
confused me, and being this confused I swallowed my pride enough to go to
desperate means to get my answers. I
went to a source who I have always considered worldlier than myself in most
respects, hoping that perhaps with his present situation combined with his own
experiences, he would be able to help me.
My supposed 'shaman' is behind me now, having calmly sat himself against
a low wall to watch me with slanted eyes and a thin smile. I think he's finding this as amusing as I am
beginning to.

"Just
back off the ledge and we can talk this through, all right? No-body needs to get hurt here."

The
voice from the crowd below reaches me slightly distorted with the height and
wind, not that I'm really listening. I
do look at them though, the currents of air that are working against my eyes
forcing me to turn my gaze downwards.
The wind is making my eyes water giving me the appearance of someone
who's been crying for quite some time, which is a far cry from the truth. I've been too wrapped up in my thoughts to
cry even if it were from frustration.
Actually, I doubt that I'd notice salty tears streaming down my raw skin
with my mind as turbulent as it is.

The
ledge I'm standing on is made of some sort of metal apparently, smooth and
devoid of even the smallest crack. If
it were raining now this surface would certainly pose more of a problem. As it is the tips of my boots overhang the
outcropping into the air.

Looking
down is quite interesting with that added feature; I focus on my shoes and the
ground blurs, I focus on the ground and I am left with two smears of colour in
the foreground. I believe I could amuse
myself with this revelation for a few minutes if I took a respite from my
circular musings later on. However,
despite being up here for so long that I've lost track, I feel that I haven't
actually accomplished anything. Not
that I'm bothered about how long it's been since I first took this position on
this ledge, it's just that my efforts are starting to feel futile now.

I've
decided that I don't like this ledge.
It isn't how I imagined it would be, how I saw it in one of my
daydreams. I actually imagined
something more natural such as a cliff overlooking the ocean, or perhaps the
top of an ancient temple. Once or twice
my fancy has taken me to what I imagine my temple would be. Either way I expected the ledge to be
brittle beneath me, crumbling when I ground my boot into it so that I could
watch as the little bits of it tumbled freely to the ground far below, nipped
at by the gentle breeze that would also catch at my hair, slipping between my
fingers and weaving smoothly across my body.

My
thoughts never revolved around suicide when my mind drifted to such places, nor
did I imagine anything particularly extraordinary happening to me, such as
launching into flight from that place.
I was simply there, entirely alone with only the quiet and the wind.

I didn't
plan any of this ledge business when my spirit became troubled over my freedom,
or lack of it.

I didn't
even consider finding such a place. It
is only now that I realise how ironically fitting this all is. Except for this ledge. I hate this ledge. It's immaculate and pompous with the purpose of its existence and
it won't wield beneath me, very alike the one who designed this building
actually. How fitting. I don't have my solitude either. The creature with me I can ignore, but the
crowd beneath me is noisy and desperately attempting to distract me.

All
those people are so small from up here, so insignificant. It's a detached thought of mine, starkly
different to what I thought of them when I was fighting and sacrificing to
protect them all. I saved their lives
and their world at the cost of mine and they won't even leave me alone when all
I want is to be left that way. I think
I can feel justified in calling them ungrateful because of that.

Bakura
has deemed them all insignificant as well, although I don't think he's ever
done anything to warrant them feeling grateful to him. So very different to me. He's seen them as irrelevant for years, from
a height as well as when he's on the ground with them, moving amongst
them. My negativity towards them is
fairly new, and partially due to the fact that they look like little more than
inconsequential swarming ants. We're
different like that, but not so different despite what most people think.

Everyone has
us pinned down as different, cut and dry with no room for contradiction to the
statement. Ignoring the basic truth
that we are both of the same time and same essence, Bakura and I are still very
much alike. We're creatures of the
dark, neither of us particularly benevolent before we were sealed in an Item
and both of us deeply affected by our imprisonment. His insanity is just more apparent than mine, although the times
I've issued one of my more severe 'Game Penalties' have caused my friends to
think twice about my own sanity. Not
that it ever really bothered me.

Our attitudes
are almost identical as well. We'll
both tackle a situation head-on without too much fussing over the repercussions
at the time, displaying aggression and astuteness simultaneously. I rely more on tactics than on aggression
most of the time, but it's simply in Bakura's nature to be a borderline
sadist. In all, we're generally both
ruthless, cold and calculating when it comes to making decisions and then
carrying them through. A clear example
of that would be when I chose to carry out an attack against Kaiba that may
have resulted in him plunging to his death.

That changed
my relationship with my Hikari a great deal.
In fact, I believe I lost even more of my freedom on that day. Yugi was certainly more afraid of me, scared
for the longest time to let me out of my dark little cage because of what I
might do. I even picked up on stray
panicked thoughts from him that I would forcefully possess him, as Bakura does
Ryou. At the time I didn't understand
his fear of me. I had made the decision
to go forward with my attack logically, come to a conclusion wherein the outcome
was acceptable, and gone ahead.

I didn't
believe for a moment that the force of my move would unbalance Kaiba enough to
send him off of the wall, and I stand by that.
The rift between Yugi and myself only widened when he refused to allow
me to explain that to him though. He
trusts me more now, but that experience did have its repercussions. He's certainly more wary when I get
'over-excited', as he calls it. But all
of that is of little consequence at the moment, aside from the fact that it
took me a few steps closer to feeling trapped to the extent where my spirit is
almost suffocating.

Somehow I
knew that Bakura would understand my feelings, and the decision to actually
turn to him for help was made far easier by the fact that we are very similar
in nature, my desperation playing a hand as well. I think that's the only thing that allowed me to approach him,
working in combination with my overwhelming confusion against my pride and
better judgment, of course.

It took
a little time, but he admitted to me that he used to feel the same way as I
do. He is bound to the Ring, and he
used to be bound to a shared body, something he was glad to loose. Ryou was pleased as well, although there was
initial sorrow mingled with some fear over the fact that he was no longer
needed. Ryou realized as quickly as I
did that if Bakura no longer needed him as a host, then there was nothing
stopping him from going all-out if he happened to lose his temper and unleash
his aggression on his Hikari.

And so I
gained yet another commitment the day when yami and hikari could separate,
making sure that Bakura didn't go for Ryou's throat with a knife or one of his
other toys. The reason behind the
actual dividing is something that I'm still trying to puzzle out myself. Isis believes that it was simply meant to
happen but I'm not so sure, and neither is Bakura.

Anyway,
Bakura coped with his condemnation in a most remarkable way, one that can only
be learnt through experience. He
changed his perception of freedom. It seems
ludicrously simple, but apparently it works.
He hasn't disclosed how he actually did this, but he got me to
understand the basic principles.

Everyone is conditioned to a degree to
some level of thinking and perception: this sensation is hot, that sensation is
cold; too much of this feels bad, not enough of that isn't fulfilling; feel in
awe of that because it's better than you; you're nothing on your own; got to
settle down and then add to the surplus population; need to do something
worthwhile every day, the list goes on, from the most fundamental facets of
good and evil, to the most minute details such as living in misery 'for the
good of the children'.

Many
break away at least a little from that which is imposed upon them from birth,
deciding that they don't believe in higher powers, that they like their
independence, think that children are more trouble then they're worth and will
do as they please, deeming that which is worthwhile and that which is not
themselves. Our thoughts on the larger
pieces in this puzzle that we have deemed life are harder to alter, those basic
principles that we base our existence on.
We can delude ourselves into thinking that we have become separate from
conditioning in that respect, but few are ever truly free.

Good and
evil was one such concept that Bakura gave his own opinion on, one that I
understand but can't change the way I think over. He's travelled his own path to get to his understanding. Bakura explained that, in his mind, he saw
good and evil as individual perceptions of actions rather than two individual
forces in the universe supported by the powers that be. If to be evil is to murder and we do not
murder, does that make us good?
Similarly, if good is to aid the injured and we either don't or can't, are
we evil? What if a creature was beyond
all help and living only for its own suffering? To kill it and relieve it of its misery would seem the charitable
thing to do, but it would be murder and so more a sin than a righteous
action. It all comes down to
perception. Whilst not given as much
reflection as good and evil, freedom is apparently based upon the same
principle.

Some
part of me has decided that the level of freedom I have is unacceptable and I
feel tormented because of it. However,
there isn't a great deal that I can do about my situation, so rather than alter
my autonomy to satisfy myself, I should alter my perception of freedom to an
extent where I no longer feel incarcerated.
At first the idea seemed positively ludicrous to me, but Bakura has
found that it's worked for him quite nicely.
He couldn't do a whole lot about his situation when he and Ryou shared a
body, and so he experimented in this way to alleviate some of his own
discontent. It took years of abusing
his hikari to fine-tune the idea, but in the end the spirit claims to no longer
feel trapped.

"Look,
just calm down and back away from the ledge.
If you want, we can bring one of your friends up to talk to you. Okay?"

Oh, this
is getting laughable now. Soon I'm
going to make that man eat the silly device that's amplifying and distorting
his voice in a very annoying way, breaking my train of thought and obstructing
my progress. Stupid mortals. It's not by my choice that I'm up here. Kaiba.Corp was all Bakura's idea. He said that the CEO needed to 'learn a
lesson'. What exactly that lesson is, I
have no idea; the Tomb Raider hasn't divulged that particular piece of
information to me just yet.

I think
Bakura just wanted to frighten him, something that he's done surprisingly well
considering. At first my old rival was
just annoyed that I was stood on the top of his building and showing no
inclination of coming back down.
Talking through that contraption earlier Kaiba certainly didn't seem
very happy. But after an hour when he
talked to me again, he seemed genuinely upset and frightened.

He wouldn't be able to hear anything I
said, so his attempts to question why I was up here were quite stupid, but he
sounded afraid all the same. Afraid of
what I'd do, afraid of why I was doing it, and afraid that if I did do what he
feared I would, every single day he'd have to walk past where I landed into the
building that I dived from. He's
frightened all right. I think Bakura's
aim in choosing this building was to bring Kaiba down from his 'High and
Mighty' status. The Tomb Raider nearly
always has to gain something satisfactory from anything, and this time he's
chosen to debase the CEO of head of Kaiba.Corp. It seems to have worked.

I can
ignore Kaiba though. This is for a greater
cause. Even his challenge that he'd
never be able to go against me at his best in a duel if I nose-dived didn't
break my resolve. Yugi's tearful words
nearly did however. I blocked off the
bond completely, put up every shield that I possess, when I started walking up
the first flight of stairs in this building.
Bakura stopped me from backing down though whenever my Hikari undid me,
talked to me in firm tones without moving from his spot behind me.

I
haven't looked at him in a while come to think of it, not since we got up
here. I've been too wrapped up in my
own thoughts to grant him a look, and he hasn't exactly reminded me of his
presence by speaking.

Ah, he's
smoking. That's new. I wonder when he started that habit? Ryou must be glad that he has his own body
now so Bakura doesn't go saturating their shared one with all those
pollutants. I for one am glad that he's
down wind of me so I don't have to habitually inhale it. I'll bet he's just doing this to reaffirm
his badass image; somehow he got the idea that smoking was 'cool' into his
head. Whatever. It's not like it's going to kill him.

He seems
pretty confident that this little stunt isn't going to kill me either. I must admit that I do feel some sense of
liberation at this height, the savage wind whipping through my hair and around
my face, tugging at my clothes and, ironically, pulling me back from my
significantly lower destination. It's
quite invigorating actually. But it's
not quite the freedom I was hoping for, nor the change in my thoughts over
it. Actually I'm not too sure what I'm
hoping for anymore. It might be the
altitude, it might be 'Officer Kea's' loud, distorted and annoying voice, or it
could have been that I was completely deluding myself into believing Bakura's
words up until this point and now I am regaining my common sense.

"Are you
going to jump then? It's getting a
little tedious now, all this waiting around," Bakura asks smoothly, taking his
little glowing-stick-of-coolness away from his lips long enough to speak. His silence up until this point makes me
wonder if he's been lost in his own thoughts as well, too distracted to notice
that I'm still stood here in the same stance that I've held for an untold
amount of time, doing absolutely nothing.

"I don't
know." I might as well be honest with
him. He said he was going to help me
change my perception of freedom, and although I don't know exactly how he means
to do that, I naively and potentially stupidly trusted him. And now I'm cold and wind bitten with a headache
from over-thinking.

"I
promise it won't hurt." He smiles
around those words. I can't see him but
I can tell. I also heard him take his
cigarette back to his mouth on the last word.
I get the sense that he's not taking this as seriously as I am. But then, he's not the one on the ledge.

The
people on the ground most likely don't even know that he's up here. To most of them, I'm just some teen that's
cracked under the pressures of life and has decided to end it all by pasting
himself to the pavement from a great height.
Either that or I'm making an extreme 'cry for help', attention
seeking. Officer Kea is down there
probably thinking that I'm doing all of this because something in my life has
gone terribly wrong, and that I'm acting under the misconception that if I make
myself look as desperate as possible then someone will sweep in and take all my
troubles away from me. Unlikely. I may be a little messed up in the head
right now, but I'm not deluded enough to think that that could possibly happen. Life doesn't work that way. My few friends on the ground who don't
believe that either of these possibilities is true don't have a clue as to
what's really going on in my head either.

Maybe
this is what Bakura meant: creating my own little world in my mind that nobody
but me can understand and perceiving that as freedom. No, that's stupid. I
could do that before I talked to him anyway.
Now it's just a bit more extreme because whilst I'm actually up here
looking for the answer in my own little world, everyone else thinks I'm going
to off myself. That's not quite what I
want.

Maybe
death *is* the freedom that Bakura is raving about, at least for me, and that
all this 'altering my perception' stuff was just a way to get me up here. Maybe he doesn't think I'll be satisfied
with the perception of freedom that he's achieved and believes this more
extreme method of 'release' will make me happy. It would certainly make him happy. But I'm already dead, so how could I kill myself? I guess I could die in that I went into a
sort of limbo, suspended for all time away from everything. But that would be like being inside the
Puzzle again. No, that wouldn't be
something that I would even remotely refer to as freedom. So what is?

"I don't
understand any of this." Finally I
admit to it. I have no idea what I'm
supposed to do now. I'm scaring my
friends, although I'm too preoccupied at the moment to really care, I'm starting
to go stiff because I've been motionless for too long, and the fact that my
confusion has only gotten worse and worse has brought about a headache
equivalent to someone sending a spade through my skull over and over. All in all, I'm not feeling very free or
having my perceptions changed a great deal.

"I'll
help you, but you have to make the first move.
Make the decision."

Thanks. That helped a lot. I'm starting to lose patience and all of this is feeling very
hopeless to me. If I go down 'nice and
slow' like Officer Kea keeps telling me to, I'll have to face what I've
done. I haven't actually done anything
other than scare a crowd of people, but even that will undoubtedly have its
repercussions. It makes me wonder what
exactly Officer Kea's definition of everything being 'all right' is. Pretty different to mine I believe.

That's
an interesting thought. His idea of
everything of everything being 'all right' is me coming down using the stairs
and collapsing into an emotional mess to be later sorted out through the use of
heavy medication and a psychiatrist. My
idea, on the other hand, is of understanding what Bakura has been talking about
and getting what I want. Both of us
have totally different perceptions of what is essentially the same thing:
having what we want. If things go our
way, then everything is all right. For
two people with different perceptions of what 'all right' is in a situation,
one of them is bound to go home unhappy.
It's the same as our perceptions of good and evil, something that we
would likely disagree on as he's a law enforcement officer and I'm not.

Still,
I'd rather it not be me who comes out of this with things not having gone my
way. Apparently we have opposite ideas
on the correct course of action in this particular situation. At least at the moment. Vertigo is starting to wriggle into my brain
and around my chest again, so jumping is starting to feel more appealing than
just standing here and letting my joints freeze. I don't want to do what Officer Kea wants me to do because that's
not what I want. Would that make all of
this an act of defiance? If I jump
simply for that reason, I'm going to feel pretty stupid on the way down.

I think
I know what Bakura is doing now. He's
giving me freedom of choice over what is technically my existence. I can't die, but I can leave this world, but
I have the choice not to. I have the
basic freedom of choosing between life and death at this exact moment. This realisation is not as wondrous and
fulfilling as I thought it would be, but it's a step in the right
direction.

Right,
I've got my choice, so what do I do with it?
Well, in everyday life there are few ways in which I could be 'killed',
but the ways that do work could send me hurtling into oblivion before I even
knew what was going on. I'd have the
freedom of choice over my continued existence stripped from me in one go. That doesn't seem right. There's also the fact that Bakura is
practically goading me into jumping, which makes this quite confusing. Perhaps he's testing me. But for what possible purpose would he do
that? If I died, he'd be happy, if I
lived, he'd just find another way to do it.
At the moment he seems happy to help me 'realign my perceptions' so I'll
leave his motives alone for the moment.
I have enough to ponder as it is.

Right,
the sum of the last few hours is my realisation of freedom of choice. I didn't appreciate that before so I guess
that could vaguely be classified as an alteration in perception. Yugi's talking to me again. This time I don't listen. I think I'm on to something at last.

I had
choice before this realisation though; I could eat or not eat, I could
materialise or sit in my Soul Room, I could play the Dark Magician or leave him
in my hand until the next turn. But
there were some choices that I didn't -and still don't- have; I have to protect
Yugi–I don't mind doing it but it's an obligation still-, I have to return to
the Puzzle every now and again to 'recharge', I have to wear whatever Yugi was
wearing when I materialised. So does
that taint my freedom of choice? Does
it make it less or unaccountable entirely?
Or does it not matter and I should appreciate the freedom that I do
have. Maybe Bakura wants me to be
grateful for what I do have. Maybe
that's it and there's no divine enlightenment waiting for me at the end of this
little journey that I'm taking.

"You're
going to have to get down one way or another.
How do you want to do it?"
Bakura's prompting me again. It
was nicer when he was content to just sit and smoke whilst I stood here and
watched all the flashing lights congregate beneath me. But he is right in that it's time I got down
and it's my choice how I do it. The
question is how am I going to use it.
He hasn't moved from where he's sat, so he's not going to violently make
the decision for me. This is purely my
decision, my freedom of choice being used.
It's pure and no one is going to take it from me. I might as well enjoy this.

I'm
tired of this now and I haven't really gotten anywhere. I haven't learnt anything spectacular aside
from the fact that Bakura isn't a very good teacher. I've had enough of all this standing around and thinking in
circles now. So I walk away from the
edge. There's a fair bit of noise from
over it as I retreat and then a whole lot more when I run off it into a swan
dive.

The wind
on the ledge was nothing compared to this.
This feeling of plummeting, of being away from absolutely everything
around me, of feeling like I'm floating in a wild and savage environment. It's exhilarating. The ground approaches fast but every moment of this feels like a
sweet eternity. Breath leaves me and I
close my eyes for the final few storeys, wanting to experience it fully for the
last few mortal seconds through senses other than my eyes. I want to appreciate it fully, every single
moment of it. The darkness I bring
about myself has nothing to do with me not wanting to see the ground greet me
and break my fall; I simply want to feel without the distraction of seeing.

I didn't
really hear anything before; I was too distracted by how wondrous it all felt,
but the sirens, the screaming, and the gasping breaths of those I'm fast
approaching have all suddenly gotten louder.
There's a whistling sound as I plummet what I believe to be the final
few meters, a distance far too small to me.
Then everything goes quiet.

Then
there's something solid beneath me, and the air is humming with energy. I slowly, lazily, open my eyes to
darkness. Is this death for a spirit
then? The Shadow Realm? Am I stuck here for all eternity from now
on? If so, that feeling was worth it.

Twisting
my head to the side I see Bakura sat a few feet from me, in exactly the same
position he was in atop Kaiba.Corp, only now he's leaning his weight on his
knees rather than against a protrusion from the ground behind him. I'm definitely in the Shadow Realm, and unless
Bakura dived right after I did, he brought me here just before impact.

He's
watching me intently with bright eyes, his bangs drooping over his face to
obscure his vision. "Wasn't that
liberating? Those moments of pleasure,
of abandonment?" he asks, his eyes betraying the fact that he is remembering
his own experience of this as he speaks.
I can see the bliss in them, an emotion I don't see in them often. "You've been searching for freedom in the
literal sense, whereas I experience it as a lack of restrictions as you just
have. You've been looking for something
that lasts, pure and untainted, which nothing you knew of before now could ever
be. You can only experience it on
occasion, and then it's the memory you treasure."

At last
it's all made sense. I understand. All that waiting on the ledge, the craving
and the confusion, it only made the experience sweeter. For a few seconds, I felt alone in the best
possible sense, my constant burdens of duty lifted and immeasurable relief
assaulting me because of it. I felt
that I was solely to myself, caring about nothing other than sensation. Total and complete abandonment. Freedom, you could say, from responsibility,
entrapment, emotion, everything. And I
will treasure that feeling. I won't
yearn for it anymore.

Now,
lying here on what's been labelled the floor, I feel relieved and satiated,
that splinter of need that had been steadily driving me insane finally removed
the second I took to the air. The fall
itself was nothing short of exhilarating, an experience that I chose to undergo
through my own power and free will. I
gained a greater sense of independence and liberation through my own
choice. It's a shame that I had to
scare a lot of people to accomplish that, but I did it, and the memory of it is
enough to keep me so I'll never need to do it again. Surprising as it might be, Bakura was right; like so much in
life, freedom is only a matter of perspective.

*** End
***

'The only thing that mankind has never
been able to grasp is that death may be the only absolute freedom there ever
was.'

Kaworu
Nagisa

My
thanks go to Pachelbel, Blue September, Logo, Seraph Reaver, ShadowSpirit and
GothicDJ for nitpicking this for me.
Also a second thanks go to Logo for bringing the above quote to my
attention, which seemed to suit this story well.

The author would like to thank you for your continued support. Your review has been posted.